It's more noticeable than ever, because the stages are getting larger and more complicated, with even crossing one back yard becoming a punishing marathon in which a ten-yard distance is somehow stretched out into a twisting, turning path ten times that length. They're just there to block your path, like the trees and the bushes and everything else in the game that isn't an enemy. You might think the tyres in the screenshot above are something you can interact with, bounce on 'em like trampolines maybe, but no. Presumably it's Butt-head's neighbourhood, because everyone here still wants to see him dead. Now things are starting to open up, and Butt-head strolls through the streets and back gardens of a suburban neighbourhood. It's a terrible segment in a pretty abysmal game, and its only saving grace is that there's only one stage of it before you get back into the marginally less aggravating wandering around. The sewers are so bereft of visual interest that using landmarks to negotiate is a no-go, and thus you're reduced to drifting aimlessly through the sewers like the ghost of a turd with unfinished business. So, merrily you trot through the bland sewer with its complete lack of interesting enemy design and buckets of unavoidable damage, until you travel through a doorway and end up somewhere that you've been before, your stomach clenching as you realise that this entire stage is a big maze. Not only are the spiders invincible they're also nigh-impossible to avoid a lot of time - I suspect the developers realised this after they'd finished making the stage, and that's why there are more health-restoring soda cans dotted around than usual. I mean, erm, I assume that's true, I've never tested it out myself. You can jump on the rats to kill them but not the spiders, despite it being much easier to stomp a spider to death than a rat in the real world. There are two types of enemy roaming the sewers, rats and spiders. Beavis' jumps are fairly responsive, if a little floaty, but that is all the credit I am willing to an extend to a stage that otherwise lurches between frustratingly tedious and tediously frustrating. This change does not increase the fun factor any. It's all change for stage three, and suddenly the game has become a side-scrolling platformer as Beavis makes his way through the sewers. They're just horrible idiot kids, and that's not a lot to work with mechanics-wise. The problem is that, as characters, Beavis and Butthead are difficult to game-ify because they have no special powers or talents.
If you swapped the sprites from this with the Doug game, they'd be almost indistinguishable.
Aesthetically, there's a thin veneer of Beavis and Butthead sloppily applied to the game, but replace that with the trappings of any other franchise and it'd work just the same. It's (almost) all walking around while trying your hardest not to have any contact with other humans, and I've already played that game - it's called My Life, Starring Me. There is no gameplay that revolves around mocking soft-rock music videos or setting things on fire and getting real excited about it, no gameplay that lets you guide Beavis and Butt-head into an extremely stupid course of action which will lead to severe personal injury as they attempt to gets chicks. Walk to a place, find out you need something you don't have, go and get the thing, walk back. van Driessen was so I could collect some files for him, a sequence of events which sums roughly eighty percent of Beavis and Butt-head's gameplay. I walked around some more, because what else was there to do? I found the school's principal, who made me walk all the way back to where Mr. I'm playing the Game Boy iteration, because apparently deep-down I hate myself so much that playing a bad videogame isn't enough, I have to play a bad videogame in monochrome. Several videogames, in fact, on formats including the SNES, Megadrive and PS1. Beavis and Butt-head's occasionally controversial antics were very popular, and as with all popular things from the Nineties, they received a videogame based upon their misadventures. I was never particularly violent, at least. Am I including myself in that group? Maybe a little. They're basically half the people I went to high school with. They are violent and crude, sniggering at any word that sounds even vaguely like a body part. Created by Mike Judge and airing on MTV in the mid-Nineties, Beavis and Butt-head chronicled the adventures of the two eponymous teenagers, a pair of moronic, disgusting losers who wanted nothing more than to score with babes and talk shit about music videos.
I think Beavis and Butt-head is still well-enough remembered that a brief recap will but sufficient, so here it is.